Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 45 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

*

Tagen knew by the sudden change in the set of Daria’s back that the call had ended badly a split-second before she slammed the device back into the wall from which she’d taken it. He heard the bang even here in the parking bay. He could not hear the stream of cursing he could see her mouth move to make, but he could well imagine it and it troubled him. It was not merely disappointment he was seeing in her now—that he had seen while they were still stopping at hotels—but a baffled, frantic anger.

The sound of the public phone striking down had drawn Grendel’s attention as well. The cat draped itself over the back of Tagen’s chair for a time, watching as Tagen watched. Daria picked up the thick book chained to the comm center, paged through it, and then suddenly tried to throw it as well. The short tether prevented more than a low thump and rattle, but even the sight of it in its tight swing could not satisfy Daria. She kicked at the solid wall of the darkened building at which they were stopped, and then limped a little ways off and leaned her face into the bricks.

He hoped that meant they were done for the night. They had driven until dark, stopping at every public privy and fueling station they passed to inquire after E’Var, and then at every feeding place as well. When the sun failed, Daria began to make her calls, leaving the highway to search the lesser roads for towns she may have missed. Now, with full dark all around them, she had turned and taken them perhaps halfway back to their starting point of the morning, calling all the places she had stopped them at during the day, and still there was no sign of him, no word. Somehow or another, the prisoner had eluded them.

It was an ugly turn to what had begun as such a promising day, but Tagen’s own frustration had long been swallowed up by weariness, and then that by concern for his human. Pursuing E’Var’s shadow all night would do nothing but dull their wits the next day. Tagen knew that, and he could put this setback aside for another day, but Daria was fueling her dismay with fatigue, and the deterioration of her ready mind and mood were now evident to anyone. If she did not have sense enough to see that it was time to stop, he would have to order her, and that would not be pleasant.

At last, Daria raised from her slump and turned away from the phone. She began to trudge back across the parking bay to the groundcar, and the cat, demonstrating a startling lack of good sense, leapt into the foreseat and curled up on Tagen’s lap to await her return. Tagen rubbed the animal’s neck uneasily. Daria was not meeting his eye through the window. The foreseat was likely to soon be a very bad place to be.

She opened the driver’s door and dropped into the pilot’s seat. There, she sat. Her hands tightly gripped the guidance wheel. The open door admitted a warm current of night air scored by insects. She stared straight ahead, her face tight and deeply shadowed where the vehicle’s interior light did not touch her.

Tagen waited. Under his hand, the cat began to purr.

Suddenly, if not entirely unexpectedly, Daria made a fist and slammed it down on the console, bringing Grendel awake with all its fur on end and its claws sunk deep in Tagen’s thigh. “Goddamn it!” she shouted. And then sighed and covered her face, all her energy spent.

Tagen took a tight-jawed moment to extract the bristling cat from his person and deposit it in the rear of the vehicle before addressing her. “It is late.”

“No, it is early,” she shot back in clipped, sarcastic mimicry. She glared at him from between her splayed fingers. “It stopped being late hours ago. Where the hell are they? How did I lose them?”

That she hoarded the blame for herself did not escape Tagen’s notice, but he had to pick the things he responded to and it was more important now to calm her. He said, “He does not travel every day. We have seen this.”

“But he left the hotel this morning!” She struck at the wheel again and Tagen heard the cat skitter to the furthest corner of the car. “If he stopped somewhere to…well, we’d have heard about it on the radio by now! Where is he? Why didn’t I…” She burst into tears.

Guilt rolled through him helplessly as he looked away out the window. This travel was torturous for her. She’d borne up well thus far, but every new day was harder. Six years she said she’d locked herself away, and now, all at once, he had forced her into this world and away from her securities. He had made her in part responsible for E’Var’s capture without any training of any kind. She could not even ask another human for help because of the danger it would mean for Tagen. The sooner he was gone from her (his heart sank and burned), the better she would be.

“Daria,” he said, once the storm of weeping seemed to slacken. “Anything could have happened. It could be as simple a thing as…as a need for a new wheel.”

She sniffled and scrubbed at her eyes, aged by exhaustion. She gave no sign that she had heard his words. When he laid his hand over her knee, she did not even look at him.

“It is time to rest,” he said. “E’Var will move on tomorrow. We will find him.”

“What if he’s gone?” She did turn then, searching his eyes with shame shining in hers. “What if he hit his limit and left? What if that was our only chance and I let him get away?”

“It was not you—”

“Yes, it was, dammit!” She wrenched her knee out of his grip and would have jumped from the car if he hadn’t caught her wrist. “I should have had that map figured out the first day! And I would have, if I wasn’t so…fucked up!” Her fist drove out again, and her target was not the console this time, but her own leg.

“No,” he said, beginning to be alarmed.

“This is all my fault!” she shouted, and struck herself again.

“No!” He caught her hand before it could land another punishing blow, then cupped her chin and forced her to face him. “No,” he said intently. “Criminals elude the law, Daria. I will not—” She tried to twist away and he brought her back forcefully, his voice taking on new vehemence. “I will not hear you punish yourself because you have not done in three days what neither I nor all Jota’s soldiers could do these past fifty years!”

She stiffened under his touch, her eyes till averted, and then slumped slightly. She sniffed, knuckling at her reddened eyes. She said nothing.

“You are tired,” he said, releasing her. “And so am I. And somewhere, Kanetus E’Var is surely sleeping.”

She took a shaky breath and nodded. “You’re right,” she said dully. “I’m so sorry.”

He bared his teeth at the apology, and then softened his irritation by leaning across and nipping gently at her shoulder. “Whatever may have happened,” he said, “it is clear that we will not meet with him tonight. Let us find a bed, my Daria. Tomorrow, perhaps, will bring us news of this day’s work. And if not, still it is another day.”

Again, she nodded, though she still refused to meet his eyes. Her hand found his, however, and her fingers twined with him for a moment, but her heart was not in the gesture and she soon pulled away. She leaned out to catch her door and close it, and then fired the groundcar’s engine and set the vehicle in motion, all without speaking.

Silence. It was not a comfortable companion.

Tagen stole several sidelong glances as the car passed through pools of roadside lighting and saw only the despondency of his overwrought human. He knew of nothing more to say to her that could console her, and it gnawed at him.

Daria took them a very short distance before pulling into another parking bay. The building there had the look of a hotel, and he knew by the defeated way in which her eyes moved over its identifying letters that she had called them already, asking after E’Var, and viewed coming back here to rest as a kind of defeat. She began to unharness herself, her shoulders bowed.

“If I were a better man,” Tagen remarked, looking out the window at the sky. “I would know what to say to ease your mind.”

“If I were a better woman, you wouldn’t have to say anything, because you’d have caught him by now.”

He frowned at her and halted her retreat with a hand on her knee. “Why must you insist on blaming yourself?”

“Because it’s my fault!” She wrenched away from his touch, her hands drawing into fists. “This, all of this, is my own fault!”

That made so much no sense that he couldn’t even determine how to argue with it. Cautiously, he returned his hand to her knee. On the tee-vee programs, over-strung females responded best when first broached with physical contact. He said, “It was through your efforts that we were able to determine E’Var’s victims from Earth’s own dead.”

She did not reply. He wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged by that or not. He continued, “It was your eyes that saw the pattern in E’Var’s hunting. Because of your help, we know we are on the right road.”

“Big deal!” she exploded. “So we’re on the right road! He didn’t spend the whole day just screwing around! We were driving up and down this stupid right road while he was out killing people! And-” Fresh tears welled up in her eyes and she slapped at them, hard. “And we could have had him last night if I—”

This was what was scratching at her?

“If you what?” he demanded. “If you humiliated yourself to a stranger? Do not you dare to take blame for that!”

She rolled her eyes at him, and if he hadn’t already seen this gesture performed on the tee-vee, he might have thought her over-exhausted nerves had provoked her to seizures. As it was, he had seen it, so he recognized the gesture as a deriding one.

“Daria,” he said, biting down hard on the anger that threatened to warm itself up in his belly. “A female should never be made—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she said curtly. “Being a female is nothing special here on Earth. A century or two ago, it was common practice to bury us alive as babies all over the damn planet because feeding us was such a nuisance. Fifty years ago, it wasn’t a crime to rape us. Twenty years ago, a guy couldn’t be prosecuted for beating his wife unconscious. We are still being stoned to death in some parts of the world for wanting to pick out our own clothes, so don’t try to tell me I’ve got some gender-inceptive right to respect from everyone I meet. I’m really happy for you that chivalry isn’t dead on your perfect planet, but the bitch is good and buried here so I don’t want to hear about it!”

He couldn’t have heard that. The words ran themselves through his mind again and he broke open each one in search for some secondary context, shock freezing him a little harder as each maintained its meaning.

They killed their females? No. The humans he knew were obsessed with their own offspring, with keeping and caring for them, with bonding to their sires, with—

They killed their infant females?!

“All I had to do was flash the guy,” Daria was saying. “I let my pride be more important than catching a killer and he got away. If even one person died today, it’ll be because I made it happen. And you’re trying to cheer me up like it doesn’t even matter, and it matters, damn it.” She sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the guidance wheel of the car. Water from her eyes dripped from her chin. She whispered, “It matters.”

Tagen sat with her in the dark, in the parking bay of the hotel, neither one speaking, neither one touching. He sat and thought very carefully of the best way to put his words, came to the ultimate conclusion that there was no diplomatic way to say what he was about to say, and said it anyway.

“You are acting like a fool.”

She started crying harder.

Tagen sighed and rubbed at the bridge of his nose restlessly. All right, there probably was a slightly more tactful way than that. He tried again. “It is understandable that you should be acting like a fool. I can see that you are exhausted. You look terrible.”

Through her tears came first a groan, and then a giggle. She raised her head from her hands and rolled her eyes again, this time at the heavens instead of him. Then she wiped the back of her hand across her face again, muttering, “One of these days, you are really going to have to learn just to say, ‘It’ll be all right’, and let it go, spaceman.”

“It will be all right,” he said.

She finally looked at him, still worn through and without hope, but at least with some phantom trace of humor. “If I asked you to go back to that stupid hotel and knock that lecherous little jerk around for me, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh yes.”

Her small smile twitched wider. “That makes you either a really great guy, or a really bad one, I can’t decide.” She sighed and looked away at the hotel. “And it’s a moot point, anyway, I guess. I’ll go get us a room.”

She opened her door and closed it behind her, and Grendel came slinking out of the rear of the car to try Tagen’s lap again. Daria crossed half the lot under the artificial light of the hotel’s lettering, but then paused and turned around. She came back to Tagen’s side of the vehicle, opened his door, and leaned in to press her lips to his cheek.

“You’re a really great guy,” she whispered. She drew back, smiled faintly, and shut his door.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Thirty-Four

Kane dreamed of the ship and of himself, a boy barely old enough for breeches, waking suddenly in his dark room. The Yevoa Null’s engines were a comforting heartbeat in his ears; the stars, a familiar curtain drawing endlessly back beside his window. He rose, his boy’s body dropping with an ungainly thud from the high bed, and shivered in the temperate air.

He did not know what woke him, but there was a prickling in him. It was neither fear nor nervousness, but something insistent all the same. Some danger, unknown but very close to him. He couldn’t face it alone.

He left the comfort of his quarters and crept across the sitting room to his father’s bedroom door, reaching up on tiptoes to push at the locking pad. The inner room, lit by the same slowly-scrolling stars, was quiet. The only disturbance came in the low form of Urak’s sleeping breaths.

Kane crept to the bedside where his father lay naked, his huge, scarred hand resting on the back of his latest slave. The smell of mating was in the air and Kane hesitated, afraid to intrude, unwilling to retreat.

The sounds of sleep stopped all at once. Urak stirred, opening one red-dimmed eye, and looked at him. “What is it, boy?”

“I don’t know.”

Urak grunted and pushed at the slave until it roused and crawled to the floor, making room for Kane on the bed. He climbed up gratefully and curled against the warmth and reality of his father’s body, filling all his senses. The beating of the great heart, the firmness of the hard muscle, the scent of his sweat, the look of the loose strands of his father’s hair interrupting the vast plain of his chest—this was all there was, this was truth again.

“I think I dreamed you died,” he said, his voice muffled by his father’s comforting mass.

“Someday, I will.” Urak’s hand slipped up and patted Kane’s back with idle reassurance. “So will you and every other living thing. And that’s fine. Life is pleasant and death is peaceful. The transition can be a pain in the ass,” he remarked, yawning. “But you’ll find all that out for yourself. Sooner rather than later if you let that yellow-haired bitch have her way.”

“What yellow-haired bitch?” he asked, but dread had drawn every muscle in his boy’s frame tight. Some part of him, the part that made him cling like a squawler to his father’s living body, already knew and didn’t want to be reminded.

“You’ll remember when you wake up,” Urak said indifferently. “For now, just listen. She wants your mark on her, boy. She’s taking some hefty risks to win it, and that’s fine, but she’s making you take them too, and that’s not. You need to be smarter than you’re being, boy. You’re not alone on Earth.”

They weren’t on Earth. They were on the ship, his father’s ship, the ship that would be his someday. He was a boy just into breeches and it would be six years yet before he first saw Earth, before he first saw his father’s hands—the ones that combed his hair straight in the early-shift and lifted him into bed at late-shift’s end—dip into a human’s hair and crack the skull away. Kane pressed his face tighter against Urak’s chest, feeling the breath lifting and dropping him, feeling the steady thump-thud of the heart most Jotan would not believe he had. This was the ship and this was his father and this was all there was.

“Don’t go, boy,” Urak said firmly. “When she shows you the sign, don’t follow. You know well enough how to hunt without her help.”

“I don’t understand,” Kane said, but that sick feeling was swimming in his gut again. He was too young for hunts, six years too young to feel his father’s hands on his shoulders, facing him relentlessly into the bloody heap of dead humans as he was told that this was death, this was what his father dealt in. He was barely out of his pissers, he had seen only the live humans in the hold and those passing fancies his father sometimes tried to keep. But some part of him surely knew what Urak was saying because it clenched on him with cold dread.

Urak’s hand, rough as old leather, rubbed calm into Kane’s small body. Kane relaxed slowly, feeling the strength in those hands, the immortality. “You’ve done all right by yourself,” his father murmured. “You’ll be fine without me. And you’re right, boy. I do like her. I like her a lot.”

Kane smiled sleepily at the praise, not understanding its meaning, but fiercely proud all the same.

Urak gave his shoulder a pat, then tussled his hair, and finally lifted his arm away. “Go on, then. Back to your own bed. And remember what I said, boy. When she shows you the sign—”

“Don’t follow,” Kane recited, and climbed down from his father’s side. He padded back across the wide room as Urak’s slave was pulled bodily back into bed, taking the place he had left vacant.

“I loved you, boy,” Urak said when the bedroom door opened. “Only you.”

“I loved you, too,” young Kane answered, and the door hissed shut behind him.

*

Kane opened his eyes on darkness. As he adjusted to the dim light, he tried to get his teeth on the meat of his dream. It bothered him that he could not remember it. He seemed to think there was some important detail hidden in it. More, he thought he might have dreamed of his father and he wanted to remember that. There was a homesick heat and weight inside him, a pang that went right to his heart and just stayed there, feeding, but he’d hold onto the ache as long as it took just to see his father’s face clearly again. He tried, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling and chasing the half-remembered rumble of old Urak’s voice.

At last, Kane couldn’t bear another second of stillness. He shook free of his two females and sat up, scooting to the edge of the bed. He bent forward, rubbing restlessly at his brow, trying to scratch memory free of his brain.

“What is it?”

He glanced back at Raven, who had raised herself to look at him. Sue-Eye was watching, too, her eyes slitted and her breath measured to feign sleep.

He didn’t feel like dealing with his sly ichuta’a, but something in him needed to talk. He returned his gaze to Raven and said, “I dreamed of my father. He’s dead.”

Raven sat all the way up, looking shocked. “You can tell that from your dream?”

He breathed a laugh and tossed her a wry smile. “I can tell because I was there just before he died. But I dreamed of him tonight.” His smile faded and he looked away. “I don’t remember what he said.”

But he had been in space, he remembered that much. And suddenly, he longed to be there again, to have the engines thumping and humming, to have the stars outside every window at every hour. To be home.

He got up and went to his pack, moving pages of Raven’s writing aside so that he could open it and count his Vahst. Thirty-one vials filled with concentrated mixture. Nine empty.

All at once, it came to Kane to leave anyway. Right now. Put his Raven and his ichuta’a in the car and drive until his locator powered up. Go back to the ship. Go back to the Gate. Thirty-one vials was enough.

“Kane?”

His Raven. She’d anticipated him, thrown back her bedding and had one slender leg out over the side of the mattress. She was ready to rise, ready to leave.

And he was being a fool. Say goodbye to nine thousand crona because he couldn’t remember a dream? His father would give him one to the head for that.

Kane crawled back to the center of the bed and lay down, slipping an arm around each pair of shoulders and pulling Raven onto his chest besides. He toyed with the white tips of her hair as she settled herself over his heart. The thought that Urak approved of his Raven rooted itself in him and would not be removed. Kane turned a little toward her, nudging her up so that he could nip at her cheek, and she snuggled closer.

His ichuta’a, not to be outdone, wrapped her arm low at his hip, no doubt ready to tend him if he commanded her. He was tempted to do just that. A fuck was just the thing to clear his mind; a fuck with a willing ichuta’a with whose body he didn’t have to take too much care. He growled, frustrated and torn.

“What was his name?” Raven asked softly.

“Uraktus.”

Silence for a second or two. He could push his ichuta’a over, sit up, and pull her down onto his lap. Just a few seconds with her mouth to prime him, a few quick thrusts into her clenched ass as she struggled, and it would be done.

“Uu, ran, ahn, ki, tah, uu, senso,” chanted Raven.

Every letter, a balm.

Kane closed his eyes and smiled in the darkness. “Very good,” he said.

He slept.

*

She should have sprung for a double room. The bed was supposedly a queen-size, although it sure seemed a lot smaller than the queen-sized bed Daria slept in at home. She supposed she could live with a night of no sleep (although the thought having to drive all day in just a few hours was a daunting one) but she hated knowing her restlessness was keeping Tagen awake. The slightest wiggle on her part invariably sent an arm or a foot or something brushing up against her bed-mate.

She couldn’t help it. Her body was tired enough, but her mind just wouldn’t switch off. Every few minutes, the idea would insinuate itself that if she could just find the right position, she’d be able to sleep and the urge to move would overpower her. Telling herself that she’d been in every possible position already did nothing to shut her brain up and pretty soon, almost despairingly, she’d be tossing herself around and fracturing the steady rolling breaths of the man beside her. He never complained, merely let her settle herself before he sighed his way back to sleep, but Daria still felt guilty about it.

She couldn’t even blame the heat this time. The air conditioner worked just fine. She tried to blame the cheap hotel linens instead—the scratchy sheets, the paper-thin blanket—or the way her t-shirt kept bunching up and her panties riding low, all of it combining to make her skin seem to crawl. Plus, the road outside kept getting traffic, and the sound of the occasional car zipping by was as good as having a live lion roar in her ears.

Somewhere out there, Kanetus E’Var was probably sleeping like a baby after…

No. She absolutely would not think about him, about what he’d spent the day doing. Tomorrow was sure to be soon enough for all that misery.

He’d made a real fool out of her today, though. Not that he knew that or anything, but if he did, he’d probably be pretty pleased with himself. Of course, being who he was, he’d actually probably be more interested in opening up her skull and sucking out her brain than in making her look ridiculous and then screwing with her sleep.

How had he gotten around her? Was it really something as simple as a flat tire? Maybe he’d actually stumbled on the lethally magical Earth-food after all. Ate a Whopper with too much ketchup and dropped dead.

God, this was driving her crazy. Daria rolled around until she was staring at the ceiling. There was just enough light seeping in through the cheap curtains to help her imagine the cruelly leering face of the unknown E’Var. She closed her eyes, but he was there ahead of her, snapping his fangs and grinning his maniacal, alien grin. He looked a lot like Geoffrey Rush for some reason.

She’d know what he looked like for real if she’d just flashed her high-beams at the desk clerk last night.

No, damn it, she wasn’t going to think about that, either!

But her brain didn’t have anything else to do. It popped that tape right in her internal VCR and let that bastard roll. ‘Well, now, I don’t think I recall exactly who checked in and who didn’t.’

Daria rocked back onto her side, punching at her pillow and squeezing her eyes shut. She’d tried to ignore him, tried to sound bored and just a little impatient as she asked again about the big man and his two girls, one blonde, one with dyed purple hair. Tried to look like she knew he thought he was God’s gift to sleazy motels and she wasn’t impressed. Tried to look like he wasn’t scaring the living hell out of her when his eyes crawled over her shirt.

‘Sometimes my memory just needs a little nudge,’ he’d said. And winked.

‘Oh fine,’ she’d said, and one night later, she could still feel her stomach churning, knowing what was coming. But at the time, she’d only dug into her pocket. ‘What do you want, a twenty?’

‘How ‘bout you show me your goodies and I’ll tell you if I saw them?’

She hadn’t believed him at first. What the hell kind of motel manager actually says something like that to a complete stranger checking in? And then she’d looked wildly over her shoulder, as if to reassure herself that yes, Tagen was right outside and extremely visible in the passenger side of her car. ‘I’m not alone, Jack!’ she’d said, but her outraged tones were already splintering. She was back in that awful space, her heart hammering, panic drilling into her.

‘Suit yourself. You’ll never know now, will you?’

And she’d considered it. Standing with her hand still in her pocket for the bribe money he didn’t want, she’d actually considered flipping up her t-shirt so he’d give her a straight answer. And it had been awful, the worst kind of humiliation and shame to realize that she had a price, that he could see it like it was printed on her forehead, and that a total stranger could make her feel this dirty, and then grin about it.

It was Tagen who had ended it, not that he’d ever known it. Tagen’s voice in her mind’s memory, from that day in the kitchen when he’d thrown another drooling wolf out of her house. ‘Some things are always wrong,’ he’d said. And later, that on his planet, no man would ever get away with something like this. No woman ever had to stand there like Daria, feeling eyes like grubby fingers all over her, and seriously consider debasing herself in order to have a simple question answered.

So she’d threatened to slap him and he’d smirked and shrugged and she’d snatched up her room key and stormed out, and at that time, she’d felt that high rush of vindication like a security blanket over her humiliation. It wasn’t until the next morning when she’d found out that if she had gotten an honest answer out of the slimy bastard, E’Var could have been caught. If she had it to do all over again, she knew she’d strip down naked on the spot, and that was the worst part of all, knowing that she had a price all right, and she was even willing to put herself on clearance.

She wanted to throw up, even now.

He probably wouldn’t have told her the truth anyway. He’d have just said something witty like, ‘Nice rack,’ and gone back to his game of computer solitaire.

Daria rubbed hard at her eyes and rolled back onto her stomach, staring helplessly at the digital clock. She’d watched one o’clock come and go. She’d watched two pony up, and then gallop off. And now three had tiptoed up to plate and put a few men on the bases. She had to get up in a few hours. She picked up her pillow, brought it down over her face, and smothered a screaming groan.

Tagen’s slumbering breaths broke off. His hand moved to her hip and lightly rubbed, and Daria tried to relax. He was as tired as she was and he, at least, had a shot at sleeping. She rolled onto her back, remembered too late her determination to stay still, and sighed.

Tagen’s hand, dislodged by her movement, returned, this time to rest on her belly. “Are you all right?”

The last time he’d woken up and used those words, she’d ravished him against his will. “I’m a horrible person,” she muttered, remembering.

Tagen pushed himself up on one arm at once.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” she sighed. “I’m sorry. Go back to sleep.”

He did not move. She couldn’t see much beyond a pale blur above her, but she could feel him staring at her. She smiled hugely for his benefit; he’d mentioned once in passing that Jotan could see quite well at night. And it must be true, because he answered her inane grimace with a low, unconvinced, “Hm.”

“Go back to sleep,” she said again, and tossed onto her side. “I’ll be quiet, promise.”

The bed creaked as he lay back down, but his not-quite-snoring breaths did not resume. His hand found her hip again. She could feel all three of his fingers lightly splayed, covering her nicely. His claws, filed efficiently short but still sharp, were tiny dots of sensation that could never be mistaken for anything but claws. And she…she couldn’t imagine never feeling them again.

And that was one more road that was never going to lead to a night’s sleep. She sighed, started to wriggle, and forced herself to lie still.

“Is there something in particular on your mind?” he asked.

“Just nerves. Sorry.”

“Mm. I know an ancient Jotan cure for nervous energy.”

“Really?” She rolled over hopefully. “What?”

He leaned in to nip at her jaw and his hand slipped down over her hip to cup her through her panties. He stroked once, deliciously slow, growling suggestively against her ear.

Her smile forged itself by reluctant degrees. “Ancient Jotan cure, huh?”

“Trust me, it works.” His caressing hand gently eased her back against him before renewing his measured, circular touches.